Which is the best & efficient Antivirus/Security software?

Answer 1

Hi there,

Unless you really cannot afford to pay for a security solution, I would avoid free programs such as AVG, Spybot and Adaware. Surprisingly, using these three programs in conjunction now only protects you from less than 60% of the threats out there today. In all seriousness, these programs (especially spybot and adaware) are no longer good enough to be your only protection against viruses, spyware and adware (as well as trojans, rootkits and other nasties). They used to be great programs a couple of years ago, but have now been overtaken by programs with next-generation approaches.

Looking at the latest mainstream protection scores it's currently Kaspersky that comes out on top (although seems to generate a high number of false positives), ahead of McAfee and then Norton. However, these scores are all currently dwarfed by another program called Prevx1. This is an all-in-one-solution that protects against all forms of infection (virii, spyware, adware, trojans, rootkits, etc), and has proven to have the strongest protection and clean-up capabilities of all security products available today.

Besides being inherently stronger than conventional security products, Prevx1 also protects against new malware threats that most popular security products do not. Regular security products have to find a new piece of malware, test it in the laboratory, before creating a signature and making it available for their product to download to your PC. This often takes several days. During this time, your PC is not protected. Prevx1 however, works in a completely unique way meaning it defends your PC from new malware immediately, even without signatures and updates.

This alone is what makes Prevx1 currently the best security solution you can get.

http://www.prevx.com

Answer 2

2

Answer 3

Prevention or remediation ?

The best prevention is to never connect to the Internet or other computers. Computers generally don't spontaneously develop viruses by themselves ; they have to be infected by downloaded data that contains executable code. If you don't have a connection to any other computers and don't "sneaker net" removable media to your computer you shouldn't ever get infected with a virus or be attacked by malicious parties.
An isolated computer is not very useful for many people so this is an impractical course for most computer use. Using the builtin firewall of your operating system works reasonably well in most cases. If your firewall only allows outbound sessions from your computer and blocks inbound initiated connections from other computers you are less likely to be "hacked". Optional third party firewalls generally do the same thing as the builtin firewall but may offer more ease of use and more features to monitor what is happenning with each of the Internet connections you computer is handling.
This would be good reading : http://digg.com/security/The_Ten_Most_Dangerous_Things_Users_Do_Online

The best remediation ? Hard to say. Most of the name brand AV and security products work Ok. Some of the AV vendors seem to react a bit faster to new vulnerabilities that appear. If you're looking for names I've heard that McAfee and Kaspersky have pretty good responsivness to new vulnerabilities.

Some of the branded security products may use another vendors AV or firewall solution and just rebrand it with their own logo. But that's generally Ok because the community of security vendors takes the need for security solutions seriously and the products provide a measure of protection and remediation.

It's an ongoing battle between the forces of good (computer users and their security solutions) and evil (the hackers and spammers). Use something for firewall and AV and you will be a lot better off than doing nothing.

Having the best security solutions probably boils down to keeping your AV signatures updated and monitoring what your firewall is reporting.

Answer 4

NOD32 Anti Virus is the best you can get, it is the only anti virus suite on the planet to successfully stop 100% of viruses in the wild, 8 years running. It stops unsigned viruses, worms, trojans, malware, phishing, spyware, and more. NOD32 is the only solution worldwide that has not missed a single “In the Wild” worm or virus in the rigorous testing conducted by Virus Bulletin since May 1998. Virus Bulletin is an independent testing organization with full-time antivirus experts. Virus Bulletin is widely recognized within the antivirus industry for its rigorous comparative tests focusing on virus detection rates, scanning speed, and generation of false positives. To earn a Virus Bulletin 100% Award, an antivirus product must detect all of the current “In the Wild” viruses and not produce false positives.
NOD32 is the only solution worldwide that has never missed a single “In the Wild” worm or virus in this testing since May 1998 and holds the world record of Virus Bulletin 100% Awards, obtaining the 38th Award in June 2006.

http://www.coolcatinc.com/Nod32.htm
http://nod32.coolcatinc.com/Awards.htm
http://nod32.coolcatinc.com/
http://www.coolcatinc.com/How%20effective%20is%20your%20solution.pdf
http://www.coolcatinc.com/Comparative%20Chart%20for%20NOD%2032.pdf

Answer 5

The best anti virus and Internet firewall software is Kaspersky software and specially Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0.

I'm a network admin, Norton is really bad and Panda is good, but it needs more work (sorry)!

Answer 6

My opinion is that Norton sucks.

Try loading free:

AVG
Ewido
Spybot
Ad-Aware

ALL FREE. All work great. I am sure some major computer geek out there will give you some lengthy reply about foxfire and other things but for the ordinary person, use what I say. I work at a computer repair company and we use all of the ones I listed.

Answer 7

Good free anti virus programs I recommend is avast and avira, microsoft security essentials is ok, avg is worst/bad. Good paid anti virus programs (popular and top rated) are kaspersky, mcafee, norton, bitdefender. (You can try their trail versions = free for a certain amount of days). Do not have more than one anti virus installed+running on your computer. You should also back up your anti virus programs with some maleware programs (more than one is ok), like malewarebytes and spybot-search and destory.

Answer 8

Here is a list of all the major free anti-virus programs:

Avast:
http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html

Anti-Vir:
http://www.free-av.com/

AOL AntiVirusShield:
http://www.activevirusshield.com/antivirus/freeav/index.adp?

AVG:
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/avg-anti-virus-free/lng/us/tpl/v5

BitDefender 8: (on-demand only, no real-time protection)
http://www.bitdefender.com/PRODUCT-14-en--BitDefender-8-Free-Edition.html

Clamwin: (on-demand only, no real-time protection)
http://www.clamwin.com/


Personally, I use the AOL AntiVirusShield. Don't let the name AOL scare you. AntiVirusShield is made by Kaspersky which is one of top-rated anti-virus vendors in the world.

In recent tests, the most popular free anti-virus, AVG, was only able to detect about 82% of a very large sample of viruses. On the other hand, AntiVirusShield was able to detect better than 99% in the same test.
http://www.virus.gr/english/fullxml/default.asp?id=82&mnu=82

AOL AntiVirusShield has excellent virus detection rates and is extremely light on using your computer resources.

Free to anyone, AOL member or not.

Answer 9

Norton is not a good virus protection. I've had 2 viruses with this program. The tech support is not helpful either. I will never buy it again. I recommend AVG.

Answer 10

My opinion is AVG 7.1 Professional Version